Yesterday was an emotional and historic day as the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) named the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. However, they refused to write broader language around same-sex marriage that would affect all states in addition to the handful of states that had already legalized same-marriage. SCOTUS didn’t address the 30 states that banned domestic partnerships, civil unions and/or same-sex marriage in their state constitutions, including North Carolina and the codification of Amendment One. Additionally, in the 48 hours preceding the DOMA decision, SCOTUS wrote an ambiguous majority opinion on Affirmative Action, it cracked the legal foundation of Tribal Sovereignty and eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, the consequences of which are already in motion.

In times like this, where state and federal legislative attacks affect proliferate, we need to keep pushing our intersectional and long-term movement. Below is a video Southerners On New Ground (SONG) and I made as a love letter to the LGBTQ movement and our allies in response to the DOMA decision. We want to encourage the promise and commitment of love for each other as LGBTQ people, beyond any one issue or win.

SONG’S MISSION “SONG is a home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. We build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LBGTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in our communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, intersectional analysis, and organizing.” You can become a SONG member here. And please #marrythemovement.

Name Neel AhujaLocation Chapel Hill, NCJob Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel HillRelevant Class Gender, Sexuality, and South Asian Diasporas

I first met Neel Ahuja at the premiere of “All of Us North Carolina,” at the Motorco Music Hall in Durham North Carolina. Manju Rajendran, the main protagonist of the film, introduced us briefly before the screening. I immediately felt a kinship with him as we discovered a shared experience of growing up in small, rural, homogenous, middle-American towns, he in Kansas, myself in Pennsylvania. As children, we grappled with our hidden or silenced identities of being queer and 1st generation South Asians within communities that didn’t know who or what we were.

Neel Ahuja

NEEL: I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, which is a place I still visit. My parents still live there. I grew up in a part of Topeka that was kind of on the outskirts of town, situated in between suburban and rural communities. My high school was a mix of people coming from those two spaces. When I first moved there, I remember very clearly one of the particularities of being brown in the US is that there’s all kinds of uncertainties that others have about your racial identity. I was often called Mexican, I was told to go back to Saudi Arabia. It was a mixed and complicated experience, and I had many friends and positive relationships that I made in Kansas at that time. Also, especially as there was a growth in the 1990s of a…profound sense that white Americans from rural backgrounds were losing out economically as the country was changing in demographic ways, but also in its enmeshment in globalization, there were really strong feelings about race within my high school. There were confederate flags openly displayed both inside and outside the school, so there was an atmosphere of racial tension evident that we all had to grow up with. I’m referring to other South Asians students but also other students of color. We were hazed and bullied, and I remember in particular one male friend of mine and I were often called faggots or taken to be less masculine just because of our kind of racial identity or the uncertainty of our racial background, whatever the person’s view of us was. And my experience was definitely shaped by race in ways that I didn’t necessarily understand at the time, and now I’m trying to piece them together a little bit retrospectively.

After the Durham premiere, Neel came up to me and asked if I would share the film with his students in a class he taught at UNC-Chapel Hill called, “Gender, Sexuality, and South Asian Diasporas.” The title alone had me excited and I of course said yes. Neel’s impetus for teaching the class came from his own experience discovering and exploring his South Asian identity.

NEEL: The history of South Asian migration all over the world, and the politics of the incorporation of those people into new societies, really helped me understand my own pathway into the United States through my parents immigration. Part of what we grew up with, in the United States as least, is this kind of myth of the model minority, and it’s not just South Asians but many other Asian American groups. It was reading about the history of South Asian immigration and learning that it’s not simply that these are ingrained qualities of hard work and success, that we aren’t foundationally suited towards capitalism, but that these were particular moves the American state made during the Cold War to recruit certain types of workers and steal their free education that was given by the Indian state after Indian independence. Basically the model minority immigrant, that kind of highly educated immigrant, was educated by a socialist state for free or for a low cost. It’s usually somebody who is already upper class or upper middle class who’s getting into those institutions, and they were selectively brought to the United States. Although my father wasn’t a doctor or an engineer, he was implicated in those migrations. I think from that perspective learning about the broader history of South Asian migrations–about the ways in which indentured laborers were brought to replace slaves in the Caribbean, about the railroad workers in central Africa–gives you a kind of counterpoint and helps you understand that myth of the model minority is set up to pit you against other racialized groups within the society. That’s one of the issues we explore in the course, and the film All of Us is a great way to think through that history as well.

All of Us touches on this same concept of pitting seemingly separate groups against each for political gain. Preceding the presidential primary elections in 2012, The Human Rights Campaign leaked the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) campaign strategy to the public. It stated, “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…” The NOM memo also stated, “The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity – a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”

Currently in North Carolina, we are seeing more and more of the “divide and conquer” strategy by the right wing.

NEEL: In 2010, the Republicans took over the legislature as well as other important political posts in the state including the Wake County school board. This campaign [was] widely reported [as] funded by Art Pope, a major conservative donor within the state who’s become the budget director of the current governor. The Republican governor was elected last year, and now [North Carolina is] a fully Republican-controlled state. This is the first time that’s happened in the state in recent memory. There has been a flurry of bills passed by the legislature or currently under debate in the legislature that are rolling back various long-fought social, economic, and environmental justice initiatives, dismantling of public schools, particularly reducing funding for the university system, and refusing to transfer guaranteed federal funds to employment and Medicaid programs. These are just simple refusals to take federal program money that would ensure the health and wellness of people in this state. So there are very fundamental social and economic initiatives that have been undertaken by the new legislature, and I could go on listing many more bills, but I won’t. The important thing is, for now, that there are people actively mobilizing against this, and although we don’t have enough support to block some of these initiatives right now in the legislature, we are raising these issues publicly and making sure that both the state and the national press [are] not ignoring them. And within that coalition of groups and individual activists we have the North Carolina NAACP, we have members of All of Us, but we also have teachers, other labor activists, the student power coalitions on the public university campuses throughout the state have been extremely active, and many environmentalists throughout the state are really up in arms about the fact the state legislature is rolling back local and municipal environmental protections. So all of this is coming together at the moment because each one of those supposedly discrete constituencies has a real and imminent threat from a legislative action. And I think that that’s a moment in which the ways these struggles interweave is becoming very apparent. It is a hopeful time even as we watch with horror at the list of bills that have been passed so far.

The key message of All of Us is the ways these “supposedly discrete” justice movements interconnect. The intersection of our lives, our bodies, gender, sexuality, ability, race, class, etc., become the place from which we move, as whole people.

NEEL: [All of Us] seemed like a film that really got that connection of different histories coming together and demonstrating that even though there are moments at which forces of power try to split us up and divide us, we do have interconnected struggles. Even though we need to understand our different histories and how we come to those different struggles, there is something overlapping, there is a deep need for justice shared between our communities. [In my class] we had read a series of histories that pitted South Asians diasporics and African diasporics against each other in various parts of the world, whether it was Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, or even Britain. Seeing those kinds of tensions was really important for understanding how South Asian traditions had been constructed by the dominant powers that be within the community and outside the community. All of Us was a great response to that because it showed other histories, histories in which our struggles had been intertwined. Americans often know about the relationship between MLK and Gandhi, but I think that these struggles go far beyond that. All of Us was really helpful to showing a present-day reality in which these different attempts to secure social justice and belonging were coming together in one space.

I have been very much focusing on the racial identity in the migration history, but the whole impetus behind the course is to look at the ways in which gender and sexuality become these central sites at which community definition is normatively written. Many of the tensions that we experience between racialized groups in the diaspora are often written through our gendered and sexual lives. In many of the films, novels, music, writings that we studied, it was the political and social tensions that the communities were facing [that] were always put through the grinder at that point of intimate relationships. The ways in which family is normatively understood to be a heterosexual form of kinship that is about biologically reproducing, but also economically reproducing the community in a very limited way. All of Us was both representing the stories and the experience and the struggles of queer-identified people, but then also articulating a totally different vision of kinship and of family. The concept of polyculturalism moves us towards understanding not just that we have one or two particular intersecting identities–that there’s gender here and race there–but there is a very complex story that we need to share in order to work between and understand the commonalities of our struggles. So gender and sexuality are very much at the forefront of that in the course that I taught, and All of Us was really pointing to expansive visions of kinship that can offer some political ways forward after the histories of division that we know so well.

I do want to emphasize that I think that this is a great film for teaching social justice in the South, but that it also has very national implications in our present moment. Given that marriage politics is constantly on the ballot these days, given that the red-state/blue-state split and the urban/rural splits are becoming central to the way that people are talking about politics in the US, showing the actual, on-the-ground complexity of these struggles and also the kinds of possibilities and hopes for organizing a new kind of politics is something that would be really useful for a lot of different classroom settings: this would be appropriate for high schools, this would be appropriate for all kinds of classes at universities. One final thing that the activists really showed me is that they’re able to take things that you learn in school sometimes: the complexities of our own histories, they’re able to take ideas about political organizing, critical concepts about race, gender, and other forms of social difference and put them into practice. So what does it mean when in the classroom we’re teaching critical race theory or gender theory, and then we have an organization on the ground that’s deploying it in a very specific way. It’s a [means] to reflect on the ways in which the ideas coming in and out of the academy are also circulating within broader contexts. It’s not the university versus real politics or the real world. There’s often a back and forth in our ideas, and we are in shared conversation, so the classroom is one place where the film should be shown. There are all kinds of other places where it could be shown too: a bar, an activist meeting, etc. I love that about the film as well. It was the perfect ending to the semester.

Recently, a good friend of mine wrote a short paper about All of Us North Carolina for her graduate program. The paper was amazing, and I had to share it. I asked my friend to share a brief description of her program and why she decided to write about the film. She also, graciously, shared her entire paper which you can read here.

Salem Tsegaye

Name Salem TsegayeAge 25School Parsons The New School for DesignArea of study MA Design Studies (focusing on community engagement in participatory art and design)Class Title Participatory Community Engagement (@ MIlano The New School for Management and Urban Policy)

Although there was a strong practice-based component to this course, including a semester-long community-based project and opportunities to facilitate meaningful dialogue, it was somewhat difficult to smoothly transfer the theory into practice. Freirean pedagogy is incredibly dense and theoretical. It’s beautifully written, but I think it requires a number of fragmented reads, where you’re not taking the text in its entirety but instead digesting it in bits and pieces. It also helps to have supplementary texts to illuminate how Freirean pedagogy is utilized in real-world dialogic practice, and it’s certainly something the instructor provided us with.

I watched the documentary and almost immediately connected it to a lot of the theory I’d been exposed to in my course. I hadn’t intended on writing a paper about it, but when the instructor asked us to engage in a critical analysis of some of the ideas we had been exposed to in the course, I thought this was a great opportunity to really hone in on one or two ideas and intertwine them with some of those presented in the film, namely the ones that resonated with me the most. The organizing strategy used by All of Us and the way it was so clearly presented through the film’s narrative was extremely helpful, and it really allowed me to place myself both in the work of the activists in the film and the academic discourse I had been attempting to tackle on a more personal level over the course of the semester. The localized narrative of the film made a lot of the material I had been exposed to in an academic setting much more accessible and relatable.

the 50th anniversary of both the March on Washington, held August 28, 1963, [and] the integration of Guilford College. The event honored Lead March Organizer and gay Quaker civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The aim of the symposium was to uphold Bayard Rustin’s practices of breaking walls of class, gender, sexuality, race, ability and any other obstacles. “Not just Guilford, but pretty much everybody has a problem of starting to be very single-issued,” said Associate Professor of Political Science Maria Rosales. “Bayard Rustin and the Bayard Rustin Center really emphasize that people have really complex identities, and that you really need to keep that in mind.”

The film also focuses on those same complexities, delving into the purpose of intersectional organizing. Jess discusses her experience of screening the film before and during the conference:

Jess St. Louis speaks to the audience at during a screening of All of Us North Carolina.

“It was powerful to show people the film the day before and during the 2nd Annual Bayard Rustin Conference at Guilford. I was pretty involved in All of Us NC in Greensboro, and most of the people I know at the school heard about the work that we were doing as All of Us NC – but most of them were not involved in the work – so it felt personally important to share it. One of my personal highlights of the screenings was the first screening, on Friday, where a student who came to an All of Us NC workshop at Guilford and got involved with on-campus efforts against Amendment One and she got to learn more about what the bigger picture strategy looked like, the people who were involved, and more. And to show the film the following day, as one of the final parts of the conference before the keynote, to students, staff, faculty, and community members, was a beautiful opportunity to share it. The conference itself was powerful, as it was organized primarily by queer and trans people of color, many of the workshop leaders and topics focused on the intersections between queer liberation and racial justice, alongside other forms of oppression; being an active part of a queer space that centers queer people of color and provides a ground for queer anti-racist practices, visions, and power. As a white queer and trans person who spent four years at Guilford, in the past year and a half, it has been powerful and important to see that the Bayard Rustin Center has become not only the LGBTQ space on campus, but an LGBTQ space that is centered on LGBTQ people of color; and it has, and I believe will, be a space for transformative change and education that not only shares stories such as All of Us NC’s, but works to develop the leadership, vision, and practice for intersectional queer and trans organizing and movements going forward. Guilford didn’t have that when I came, and through the work of Martha Lang and Parker T. Hurley, among others, it exists. And it means a lot for all of our communities on campus, but I’m excited, and hope, for white people who are queer and trans at the school to be a part of the Bayard Rustin Center and deepen their commitment to queer and trans liberation by working with people to make racial justice a reality as well. And I think that the film is important and powerful because it shows this kind of work happening outside of the Bayard Rustin Center, in the state that we live in, and that intersectional queer anti-racist feminist organizing has and will continue to happen, with the purposes of transforming society.”

The conference, organized by Parker T. Hurley, Beatrice Franklin, Emily Peffer, and April Parker, was held at the Bayard Rustin Center at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and ran from April 26-28, 2013.

“All of Us NC moved me deeply and gave me an instructive tool to help social justice activists understand that progress comes in many legitimate forms. Watch it to learn how to squeeze the best results out of attack and loss.” – Rinku Sen, Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and Publisher of Colorlines.com

“What are models and moments for connecting people across identities and struggles in the South? How can we bridge racial justice and LGBTQ justice? How do we create and sustain proactive, intersectional and visible movement-building, even in a hostile context such as North Carolina’s divisive Amendment One campaign in 2012? Join us for this discussion, including a screening of All of Us North Carolina, a documentary about queer people of color who led the fight against Amendment One and for the rights of all of us.” – ARC

ARC’s cohort and members of the Charlotte community gathered to watch the film on April 25, 2013. Rinku Sen led a discussion with Paulina Helm-Hernandez (Co-Director, SONG), Bishop Tonyia Rawls (Founder and Executive Director, FCSJ) and Sowjanya Kudva. She also facilitated lively small-group discussions with the audience.

The conference topic was chosen in the wake of Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and anticipating dialogue regarding interrelationships among women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and social change. Interest in the topic has been fueled anew by activism around the May 2012 passage of Amendment One to North Carolina’s Constitution (banning same-sex marriages and civil unions); the June 2012 silencing of two Michigan Congresswomen, one for using the word “vagina” in floor debates about an abortion bill; and the news that in Ciudad Juárez more women have been killed in 2012 than in any other year of the “femicide era”. We understand the ideas of outrage, protest, and social transformation quite broadly and encourage you to as well.

We had a wildly successful premiere screening at Motorco Music Hall. Nearly 200 community members came out and supported the film and we were able to raise $1293 dollars to help create this media platform. My fellow (amazing) co-producer, Mikel Barton, helped coordinate the event with Mike Webster of Motorco. He helped put up posters around town while I was in Brooklyn. Many other community members came out to support this grassroots film event. Vimala Rajendran of Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe made a delicious spread of staples from her kitchen. Tim and Noah of Bread Uprising baked vegan/gluten free chocolate cupcakes and vegan cookies painted in all colors of the rainbow. All of these treats were given away for free at the event. Jade Brooks and Manju Rajendran greeted folks at the door. Tim Stallman and Anjali Rajendran contributed cakes that we auctioned off after the screening. And my father, Bakki Kudva, who came with my mother and sister, took event photos. Check out the rest of the photos here!

Quote

“All of Us NC moved me deeply and gave me an instructive tool to help social justice activists understand that progress comes in many legitimate forms. Watch it to learn how to squeeze the best results out of attack and loss.”
– Rinku Sen, Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and Publisher of Colorlines.com

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Contact

Sowjanya Kudva
sowj (at) sowjfilms (dot) com

I am a queer, South Asian filmmaker who believes that well-made, self-representative media is key to building powerful queer communities.

I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact me at sowj (at) sowjfilms (dot) com if you have questions, comments, or you want to bring this film to your community.